~ a New Yorker's American History blog

Monthly Archives: September 2015

The North Bridge over the Concord River, Minute Man National Historical Park

I received the good news today from the editor at the Yosemite Conservancy that the book for which I wrote a chapter has gone to the printer and will hit the warehouse in mid-October. As they said they might, the editorial people indeed changed the title; there is no official release date yet, but The Wonder of It All: 100 Stories from the National Park Service will be hitting book stores toward the end of the year. This will be the first book chapter I have gotten into print. I am very excited about it not just for that reason, but because if I do say so myself it reflects many years of dedicated volunteer work. Of course it is not only my story but that of other volunteers and the rangers at Ellis Island, the Theodor Roosevelt Birthplace, and Governors Island National Monument who work so hard to make one’s National Park Service experience rewarding. It has been my good fortune to work and volunteer with many people who have taught me so much.

I remember writing the piece last November. It was actually easy to do, as I just opened up about how and why I began volunteering the winter after I married and my father died. The draft was written, proofread and sent off less than thirty-six hours after I received the announcement seeking solicitations. Alas I have no image of the dust jacket to share now. They said they would send that as we get closer to the publication date. Remember that the focus of the collection is the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. Find Your Park in 2016.

What do Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Asquith, Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling have in common? They are just a few of the prominent fathers of their era to have had their sons killed in the First World War. This was not uncommon. If one visits the Union League or University Clubs here in New York, just to name one city, one see the names of the war dead from some of society’s most prominent families. Rudyard Kipling’s son was killed at the Battle of Loos one hundred years ago today. John Kipling, known as Jack in the family to differentiate him from his grandfather and namesake, was an eighteen-year-old second lieutenant in the Irish Guards fighting. It was the young lieutenant’s first engagement.

John (“Jack”) Kipling died at the Battle of Loos 100 years ago today.

Roosevelt and Kipling knew each other quite well and there are parallels and differences in the deaths of their sons in France. Jack and Quentin were both born in 1897, and each was the baby in his family. Like Quentin, Jack was a witty and inquisitive young man who invariably saw the glass as half full. Though they both died young and tragically there was a crucial difference between their deaths: when Quentin was shot down in 1918 the Germans gave him a full burial; Jack’s remains were not found, which caused his father no end of anguish. Rudyard Kipling did all he could to find his son’s remains–indeed he did not give up hope that Jack was still alive until after the Great War’s end–but it was all to no avail. He went to his own grave in 1936 never knowing for certain what happened to his youngest child.

In the early 1990s officials at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission announced that they were now certain Jack was interred in the St Mary’s field hospital cemetery in Loos. That seemed to end the mystery until, in the early 2000s, two scholars released their own research that brought the War Graves Commission’s findings into question. The truth is that we will probably never know for certain. Stalin’s cliché about one death being a tragedy while one million a statistic is as true as it is cynical. Kipling himself channeled his grief into his writing. Later that very year he “My Boy Jack.” The first stanza reads:

“Have you news of my boy Jack?”Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

It is the penultimate Sunday of the Governors Island season. I can tell that fall is coming because it’s still dark outside. A few weeks ago it was already bright by this time. Some of you have already seen the video above. It’s the piece we did at Governors Island in August. I am posting it here because I added it to Youtube. It had not been on a video platform at Governors Island and I wanted to make it better available. I hope we get to make more of these over the centennial. I finished the draft of the Hermann Hagedorn article last night and sent it to a friend to give it a look. I’m hoping to put the final touches on it over the week and send off. I really hope this gets published. We’ll see what happens.

Here is something you don’t see every day. I was at the New York Public Library today doing some research. The book I am holding here is volume 1 of the Memorial Edition of Theodore Roosevelt’s collected works. For those who may not know their TR, Colonel Roosevelt authored over thirty books in his lifetime. I wrote a Facebook post for the TRB page about a year ago. Hermann Hagedorn edited Roosevelt’s books in the mid-1920s. The collected works were then published in two versions, a limited-run Memorial Edition and a larger National Edition for the general public.

There were 1050 sets of the Memorial Edition. This is 629. What really drew my attention is that it is signed by Edith Roosevelt, Theodore’s wife. This thing has been part of the NYPL collection for 90+ years now. It’s amazing to hold such a thing in your hands.

I could not let the anniversary of the Battle of Antietam go unnoticed. It is one of my goals to attend a battle anniversary there sometime in the coming years. Usually we go to Gettysburg the week prior to the anniversary of that battle, intentionally avoiding the crowds of July 1-3. The Antietam remembrance seems more lowkey and doable. We have a friend who was ranger there for years before taking another ranger post in Washington D.C. He always spoke of the big crowds who show up every September 17 for the extended battlefield walks.

Antietam Day 1904: Not that many years ago the men who once fought the Army of Northern Virginia remembered their feats

Antietam Day was a big deal here in Brooklyn for decades after the war. This is not surprising given the number of New York regiments in the Army of the Potomac. Remember that Brooklyn was its own municipality until 1898. One sees the headstone and GAR plaques of the men of the such units as the 14th Brooklyn everywhere in Green-Wood Cemetery. Prospect Park was the big gathering place for these commemorations.

The image is a little grainy but above is a shot of the event held on September 17, 1904. You can see that there were still hundreds of living veterans there to mark the occasion. Their numbers would dwindle markedly over the next decade. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted in 1914 that while preparations were being made for the 52nd anniversary the British, French and Germans were assembling on the Aisne for a battle that could dwarf Sharpsburg. The Prospect Park programs seem to have become more muted after that first Antietam anniversary during the Great War. This was probably a combination of weariness from the news overseas and the fact that Civil War veterans were becoming fewer in number. Who wanted to commemorate after Versailles?

The Civil War’s 150th anniversary created a surge of interest in battlefield tourism. Hopefully interest will not slow down just because the sesquicentennial has come and gone.

One gets a sense of Ft. Hamilton’s remoteness in this turn of the century photograph. Note the harbor in the background.

The piece is not too extensive but there are so few references to Brooklyn’s Ft. Hamilton that I thought I would pass along this New York Times piece about the Army base. If you have never been, I can attest that this is a great excursion. It’s something to think about especially with fall coming up. Ft Hamilton is in an interesting part of the city; the Verrazano Bridge changed the dynamic when it was completed in 1964, but the neighborhood still has its unique feel. I mention Ft. Hamilton every Sunday in my tours at Governors Island. One can’t understand New York Harbor’s coastal defenses without seeing how each fortification fits into a larger picture. Ft. Hamilton has a very long history. To the best of my knowledge it is the last of the system defenses to remain an active military base. Robert E. Lee was stationed there for five years in the early 1840s, just before the Mexican-American War.

In an episode that presages Prohibition, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted in its September 12, 1918 edition that the War Department closed fourteen saloons adjacent to the base that day. The article adds that saloons throughout Bay Ridge had been shut down for months prior to that. It is not a coincidence that Prohibition came when it did. The Temperance Movement had been making headway for decades and saw the First World War as their golden opportunity. Many states and localities went dry between 1914-18. The Volstead Act came on May 27, 1919 while President Wilson and his Administration were finalizing Versailles.

Again I’m sorry about the lack of posts over the past week. I have putting my head down and focusing on the Hermann Hagedorn piece. Happily most of the heavy lifting is now done. I have another 1200 words to go and am going to do all I can to finish the draft by Friday. If all goes well I will hone it next weekend and send off a week from tomorrow. I knew a fair amount about Hagedorn before starting the project but have a better understanding today of all he did for Roosevelt’s legacy. I did not know for one thing that he first met Theodore Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill in May 1916 when the Colonel was contemplating another presidential run. Together they did so much to help with the Allied cause during the First World War. I will share those things in the future.

Here is an interesting document I thought I would share tonight. Often I search Ancestry to research people about whom I am writing. One never knows when I good detail will pop out. Here is one such document. It is Hagedorn’s 1917 military census form. Note that he filled it out on March 3, that is one month prior to President Wilson’s request for a declaration of war. Hagedorn lists his employment as writer. It does not say so here, but he was writing at the time for The Outlook magazine, for which Roosevelt had written from 1909-14. The Outlook was a hugely influential periodical and an implacable foe of Woodrow Wilson.

This is not a Selective Service document; the WW1 draft did not come until May 18. Note the ambiguity in the document’s language. The Connecticut governor states that the purpose of the questionaaire is to “procure certain information relative to the resources of the state.” What that really meant was that they were trying to figure how many men of military age were living in Connecticut in case of war. It is amazing what documents will tell you if you know what to look for.

Another summer is winding down. That can only mean that the white bucks go back into the box until the next Memorial Day Weekend. I had a fun and productive summer. I made headway on the Roosevelt Sr. book project and wrote a journal article about which I hope to hear about soon now that Labor Day has come and gone. The Hagedorn piece is moving along. I wrote about 500 words today and reached that point in these type of projects where you know you have enough material to carry you to the end. I don’t know if it will get published but were I not to write it at all the odds would be 0%, wouldn’t they?

The Roosevelts are fascinating on so many levels. This piece begins in the 1850s and ends in the 1950s and the Roosevelt Centennial. The Roosevelt family is quintessentially American, but one thing that is so interesting about them is how integral they were to international events. I suppose that was unavoidable give that both TR and FDR rose to power during the rise of the American Century. Kaiser Wilhelm I, Lincoln, Bismarck, Wilhelm II, Leonard Wood, Woodrow Wilson. These are just a few of the protagonists in the Hergdorn/Roosevelt story.

My gosh, I was looking at the calendar; this is shaping up to be a busy week. Football starts Thursday. The US Open enters is last stages. The pennant races heat up. Enjoy your fall, everyone.

I’m sorry for the lack of posts this past week. It was the first full week of classes at my school. I have also been trying to get an article finished. As of now it stands at 1500 words. I’d like to get an 1000 written over the weekend and then another 1500 over the course of the coming week. The work is enjoyable but it does leave one drained. The piece s about Hermann Hagedorn and the creation of the Roosevelt Memorial Association. I really hope this gets published. The German-American Hagedorn met Roosevelt during the presidential campaign of 1916. It was that period between the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and America’s involvement in the Great War in April 1917. Hagedorn was a first generation American whose parents had both been born in Germany before coming to New York City independently of one another. There is so much to go on.

The remainder of the weekend on Governors Island should be nice, with great weather and much to do. The West Point Fife and Drum Corps are on the island today. If you come out to Governors Island, today or any time, make sure to look at the buildings, which stand there silently containing the stories of what once took place in them. These images are of the post hospital on the northwestern part of the island directly behind Castle Williams. Robert Lee Bullard, who commanded the First Infantry Division and later the Third Corps and Second Army during the First World War, died here in September 1947. He was a West Point graduate in 1885 before serving as a young officer with Nelson Miles and Leonard Wood in the campaign that captured Geronimo.

So many generations of soldiers passed through Governors Island, which will happen at a military post that stands from 1821 to 1966. I find it fascinating how these generations overlap. Counting today you have four more Sundays before the season ends to get out and see for yourself.

[Correction, everyone: The West Point Fife & Drum Corps will be here next weekend, September 12 and 13. From where I am sitting I can see New York Harbor through the window as I type this. It’s a great day to be outdoors.]

Email Subscription

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.